Renee Pruneau Novakoff
Former Deputy Director of Intelligence for Sensitive Activities and Special Programs, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Renee Pruneau Novakoff served for over forty years in the Department of Defense and several Intelligence agencies to include NSA, CIA, ODNI, and DIA. Her last assignment was in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, providing oversight and guidance for the Defense Department’s special programs and sensitive activities to include Human intelligence, Information Operations, counter supply. Previously, Ms. Novakoff served as Joint Staff Director for Collection Management where she was responsible for leading the Defense Collection Enterprise. She also served as Joint Staff Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy. Ms. Novakoff also served as the Principal Deputy National Intelligence Manager for Russia, Europe, and Eurasia at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Prior to that assignment she was the Acting National Intelligence Manager for Western Hemisphere.
EXPERT OPINION — In order for the U.S. to successfully compete for global influence against its adversaries and to avoid a kinetic fight, we must excel at cognitive warfare; that is military activities designed to affect attitudes and behaviors. This type of warfare is a subset of irregular warfare (IW) and combines sensitive activities to include information operations, cyber, and psychological operations to meet a goal. To develop these kinds of operations, the U.S. needs intelligence professionals who are creative and experts in their field. Additionally, the U.S. intelligence and operations sectors need to be comfortable working together. Finally, the U.S. needs decision makers who are willing to take risks and employ these methods. Without these components, the U.S. is doomed to fail in competing against its adversaries who practice cognitive warfare against us on a regular basis.
U.S. focus on IW and its subset, cognitive warfare, has been erratic. The U.S. struggles with adapting its plans to the use of cognitive warfare while our leaders have consistently called for more expertise for this type of warfare. In 1962, President Kennedy challenged West Point graduates to understand: "another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin, that would require a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces…" Over twenty years later, in 1987, Congress passed the Nunn-Cohen Amendment that established Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) office. Another twenty years later, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that DoD needed “to display a mastery of irregular warfare comparable to that which we possess in conventional combat.”
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